What is AWS and How Can It Scale Your Business?

The Challenge: Scaling on Demand

Meet Rob. He runs an online shopping portal. The portal started with a modest number of users but has recently been seeing a surge in the number of visitors. On Black Friday and other holidays, the portal saw so many visitors that the servers were unable to handle the traffic and crashed. Rob wondered if there was a way to improve performance without having to invest in a new server—a way to upscale or downscale capacity depending on the number of users visiting the website at any given point.

The Cloud Solution: Amazon Web Services

Fortunately, there is a solution: Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leaders in the cloud computing market. Before we see how AWS can solve Rob's problem, let's have a look at how AWS reached the position it is at now.

A Brief History of AWS

AWS was first introduced in 2002 as a means to provide tools and services to developers to incorporate features of amazon.com to their website. In 2006, its first cloud services offering was introduced. By 2016, AWS had surpassed its 10 billion revenue target. Today, AWS offers numerous cloud services that span a wide range of domains. Thanks to this, the AWS cloud service platform is now used by a significant portion of the global market.

What Exactly is AWS?

AWS, or Amazon Web Service, is a secure cloud computing platform that provides computing power, database, networking, content storage, and much more. The platform also works with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means you only pay for the amount of service you use.

Key Advantages of Using AWS

Several other advantages make AWS a compelling choice:

Security: AWS provides a secure and durable platform that offers end-to-end privacy and security. You can benefit from the infrastructure management practices born from Amazon's years of experience.
Flexibility: It allows users to select their preferred operating system, language, database, and other services.
Ease of Use: Users can host applications quickly and securely.
Scalability: Depending on user requirements, applications can be scaled up or down seamlessly.

Core AWS Service Categories

AWS provides a wide range of services across various domains to solve common business problems.

Compute Services

What if Rob wanted to create an application for his online portal? AWS provides compute services that can support the app development process from start to finish—from developing, deploying, and running to scaling the application up or down based on requirements. Popular services include: - EC2 - AWS Lambda - Amazon LightSail - Elastic Beanstalk

Storage Services

For storing website data, Rob could use AWS storage services. These would enable him to store, access, govern, and analyze data to ensure that costs are reduced, agility is improved, and innovation is accelerated. Popular services within this domain include: - Amazon S3 - EBS (Elastic Block Store) - S3 Glacier - Elastic File Storage

Database Services

Rob can also store user data in a database with AWS services, which he can then optimize and manage. Popular services in this domain include: - Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) - DynamoDB - Redshift

Networking Services

If Rob's business took off and he wanted to separate his cloud infrastructure or scale up his work requests, he would be able to do so with the networking services provided by AWS. Some of the popular networking services include: - Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - Amazon Route 53 - Elastic Load Balancing

Other domains that AWS provides services in are analytics, blockchain, containers, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and so on.

That's a brief overview of AWS in a nutshell.

Who Uses AWS?

Numerous companies around the world have found great success with AWS. Companies like Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the BBC have taken advantage of the services offered by AWS to improve their business efficiency.

Career Opportunities with AWS

Thanks to their widespread usage, AWS professionals are in high demand. They're highly paid, earning up to more than $127,000 per annum. Once you're AWS certified, you could be one of them, too.

Author: Ahmed Bouchefra
Updated: 02 Aug 2025

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